The Missing Cryptoqueen
By Jamie Bartlett

The crime:

In 2014 OneCoin became just another one of the many newly minted cryptocurrencies looking to cash in on the success of Bitcoin and the much ballyhooed blockchain revolution. What made OneCoin, the brainchild of Bulgarian-born Ruja Ignatova, different was its promotion through a multi-level marketing (MLM) scheme and the fact that there may never have been any actual, or virtual, OneCoins in the first place.

After years of muttering from sceptics over whether OneCoin was a Ponzi or pyramid scheme (in fact it was both, a combination that “rendered facts and logic irrelevant”), the system eventually broke down, a victim of its own success. Billions of “real-world” dollars disappeared, along with tens of billions of “fictitious losses” (an accounting based on what OneCoin was supposed to be worth). Most of the higher-ups in the organization would end up convicted of various financial crimes, but Ignatova herself disappeared in October 2017 and remains missing. Some reports say that she is dead, killed by Russian or Bulgarian mobsters, while others have it that she’s swanning about the Mediterranean on a yacht (which is the conjectural conclusion that’s reached here). As of this writing, she is the only woman on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

The book:

I made a post a couple of years ago expressing my scepticism of all things crypto. My feeling at the time was that it was mainly a tool being used by bad actors or the very rich to hide their financial dealings. But I also said I didn’t understand the first thing about blockchains and mining. And, since one of my maxims is to not invest in things I don’t know anything about, I’ve always stayed away from crypto. Which I think is pretty good advice for anyone.

The people who put their faith (and life savings) into crypto thought differently. In the digital economy it’s never been a problem if “what exactly investors were buying was vague and unclear.” But never mind the investors. It’s doubtful if Ignatova understood what she was doing either. Her OneCoing co-founder certainly didn’t. Nor did anyone in their MLM network. As Jamie Bartlett puts it when telling the story of one befuddled OneCoin promoter, his “job wasn’t to understand OneCoin, it was to sell it.” Or take this account of OneCoin’s launch:

The genesis block was now launched and the first set of new coins was being “mined.” People in the room must have wondered what that phrase actually meant. Oh, they all repeated the words – genesis block, mining, algorithms – but few had any idea about the technology behind it all. What exactly was happening? Bitcoin’s mining was transparent and distributed – anyone could join, and thousands did. But OneCoin’s mining process was mysterious and secretive. Some in the crowd had heard rumors that two “supercomputers” at hidden locations were cracking puzzles and getting the newly generated coins, which would then be sent to investor accounts, depending on how many packages they’d bought. Most people didn’t care about the finer details though. They’d just heard it was the next Bitcoin.

“Good scams aren’t about facts or logic.” What could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile, the psychology behind OneCoin’s success is worth unpacking, which is something Bartlett does a good job with:

Greed or desperation alone doesn’t explain why OneCoin hit momentum so fast because those emotions are present in every MLM company, including the ones that fail. Something more powerful was at play: the fear of missing out . . . FOMO. Most OneCoin investors who put money in around this time said the same thing: They didn’t understand the technology but they’d heard of Bitcoin and regretted having not invested. When Bitcoin went stratospheric in 2013, stories proliferated of ordinary people making life-changing money not because of any particular skill or specialized knowledge, but because they got in early. The majority of these early investors weren’t destitute, but they were often just getting by. OneCoin felt like, for once in their life, they’d finally got a break.

Not so different then from buying lottery tickets, only shadier. “FOMO is driven by a desire to get rich quick, a willingness to replace work or effort with a risky bet.” As Glenn Frey sang in “Smuggler’s Blues”: “It’s the lure of easy money, it’s got a very strong appeal.” You don’t need “any particular skill or specialized knowledge.” It’s all a matter of timing. And this is a point that I think is worth underlining. Timing is everything precisely because you know the next big thing isn’t going to last. At some fundamental level you don’t believe in what you’re investing in. You know it’s a scam. You just think it’s a scam that you’ll be able to walk away from, leaving the proverbial “greater fool” holding the bag.

Of course none of it could stand very much looking into, but then who could look into it? Even if you were one of the dozen or so people in the world capable of figuring out their blockchain, OneCoin was a black box. An empty black box, at that. In any event, for investors, “It was nicer to dream than to think.”

“Money has a funny way of fencing off difficult questions and incentivizing strategic and defensible ignorance.” Because what would you rather believe? You can see how magical thinking feeds into stories like this. Just keep the faith and you too can be a crypto millionaire. You only need what a Bernie Madoff biographer described as a “well-defended mind.” And this isn’t all make-believe. With enough money you really can make your own reality and build a wall between yourself and a world that doesn’t play by your rules.

Given how complicated a story this is on anything but the most basic, crypto gold-rush level, it’s not too surprising that I had trouble keeping up with Bartlett’s narrative in places. The financial shenanigans were as opaque, and as deliberately opaque, as the crypto stuff. The whole enterprise was shell companies inside shell companies and money stuck into hidey-holes in secret accounts in tax havens all over the world. Curacao in the Caribbean, Vanuata in Oceania, Dubai. Again I had to wonder if even the experts who set some of this stuff up understood what they were doing. But complexity was the point.

The global reach of the scheme was amazing. Obviously there have been global criminal operations before, but the Internet really kicked this kind of thing into overdrive. All of Europe went into making Ruja: born in Bulgaria, raised in Germany, and with a master’s degree in Comparative European Law at Oxford (the prestige of which helped a lot). When OneCoin took off (or achieved “momentum,” as they say) it hit hardest in Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. From there it spread quite literally everywhere. “Nowhere symbolized the OneCoin craze better than Uganda,” Bartlett writes. The company grew in almost every country on earth, “but nowhere was quite like China.” Then, as the mature markets dried up in Europe, America, and Asia, growth continued in places like Colombia, Malawi, South Africa, Brazil, Trinidad, and Argentina.

As with global financial crises, a scam like OneCoin had no borders.

Despite a lot of it going over my head, I thought Bartlett did a great job telling the story and relating the essential points. He is sympathetic to some of the lower-rung investors while at the same time registering their culpability. He even draws a brief, devastating portrait of “MLM people”:

Despite their ostentatious conviviality, Konstantin [Ruja’s brother] noticed there was an emptiness to the MLM people he was introduced to. All they talked about was money: their cars, their new recruits, their Dolce & Gabbanas, their rank. Conversations revolved around the new downline they’d just opened or their weekly business volumes. Normal human interactions had been hijacked by a commissions parasite that turned everything meaningful into plastic talk disguised by self-help mantras about “first helping others.” They talked about the books they had read, not for enjoyment but to learn how to win friends and influence people. They met relatives for coffee, not to catch up but to propose an exciting new opportunity. Years in MLM does that to people.

Eventually it does it to Konstantin too. He starts out as a somewhat likeable guy but ends up infected with the dirt of the grift. It’s like another fall of man.

Noted in passing:

At one point Bartlett refers to Bulgaria as “the most corrupt country in Europe.” I can’t say this surprised me, but it did make me want to do a fact check since I don’t know what the most corrupt countries in Europe are.

There are different rankings and metrics available. It does seem that Bulgaria was ranking near the top of the corruption chart a few years ago (2019), but has since improved. Or maybe its change in position is more a relative thing. The most recent tables I found had Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine all rating as more corrupt.

I’d also note that Europe scores well on these indexes and that globally the most corrupt nations are far more likely to be found in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.

This is another podcast that’s been turned into a book. There seems to be a lot of this happening, especially in the case of true crime. I’m not complaining, as it makes sense as a way of building interest and some of the books with such an origin have been pretty good (though most, at least in my experience, have been below average to downright poor). I just flag it here because it’s now become such a significant part of the evolution of publishing.

Takeaways:

Obviously, if it seems too good (the money too easy) to be true, then it probably is. Alas, this is a lesson that’s undercut by the everyday operation of our lottery economy. Why shouldn’t the legendary “little guy” get rich off the crypto gold rush? Why shouldn’t they get a break? Because, as a very wealthy investor once told me several decades ago about how to get rich in the stock market, the little guy is always the first to lose when there’s a correction and the market flushes out all the suckers.

True Crime Files

Watergate: A New History
By Garrett M. Graff

The crime:

A team of covert operatives under the direction of the Republican Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CREEP) was arrested after breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Office Building in Washington D.C. in the early hours of June 17, 1972. It would later turn out that the break-in was only part of a larger campaign of dirty tricks (a.k.a. ratfucking) being waged by CREEP. The subsequent investigations and attempted cover-up by the White House would lead to multiple criminal convictions and the resignation of President Richard Nixon a couple of years later.

The book:

In the fifty years since Watergate the suffix –gate has become shorthand for any sort of political scandal. This despite the fact that what actually happened a half-century ago still isn’t all that well known, even among students of the period. Despite its notoriety, the facts in “Watergate,” at least what is known of them, make up a highly complex story that’s hard to get one’s arms all the way around. “Watergate was never a one-off burglary,” Garrett Graff writes. “It was the Gordian knot of scandal, unable to be untied neatly or at all.” Even today there are still a number of unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable, questions.

At nearly 700 pages, Graff’s “new history” certainly tries to be exhaustive as well as precise. Perhaps too much so. I felt that in several places he was getting lost in the weeds. But the thing is, the network of scandal, bad behaviour, “dirty tricks,” and outright criminality that constituted “Watergate” was hard for anyone covering it at the time to keep straight and is even more difficult now when so many of the names and faces, each of them involved in so many shady activities, have been forgotten. Then there were all the different investigations. Reading, I found myself constantly shifting gears as I tried to remember whether a particular legal point being raised had to do with the grand jury proceedings, the Senate Watergate Committee, or the House Judiciary Committee on impeachment. At one point I found myself wishing that Graff had included a cast of characters as a reference, but then wondered how long such an index would have been. Twenty pages at least. There were a lot of players.

A big part of what makes Watergate confusing is the fact that everyone involved had a slightly different, personally exculpatory, tale to tell (and in almost every case a tale they told, in their memoirs) about how it all went down. Then there were all the ancillary examples of other misdemeanors, many of them long forgotten. I think most people know how Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign under a cloud (pleading no contest to a single felony charge to avoid further embarrassment) at the same time as the Watergate hearings were getting all the headlines. This is something that would normally stand out as a historical watershed but for the fact that his boss would soon follow him into exile. But who today remembers the Chennault affair? The Huston plan? The fact that the Pentagon was spying on the National Security Council? The Dita Beard memo? I knew nothing about any of these but they were all part of the same White House culture.

Then there is the fact that the break-in was so stupid that it’s hard to understand how it made sense to the actors involved. Nixon would go on to win the presidency in the 1972 election in a historic landslide, taking every state except Massachusetts, so why would he bother cheating? What advantage did he think he would gain? Or did the people in charge not take nuts like Gordon Liddy seriously? As Chief of Staff Alexander Haig later opined, “The original crime was stupid, and the idea that it was possible to cover it up was more so . . . I thought that Nixon was just too smart to be involved.”

As an aside on the point of why Nixon bothered, here is biographer John A. Farrell writing in Richard Nixon: The Life:

It is said that the Watergate break-in was an act of folly because by the time the burglars were arrested Nixon had triumphed in Moscow and Beijing, the radical McGovern had clinched the Democratic nomination, and Nixon’s reelection was assured. But until the Easter Offensive [North Vietnam’s invasion of the South], and the Russian summit secured, the White House was still caught up in the fear that the Democrats would coalesce around Senator Edward Kennedy. In mid-April, as Jeb Magruder and Gordon Liddy were plotting to break into the Watergate, Nixon was weighing the ugly prospect of defeat in Vietnam – and the fall election.

I think understanding how it all came about is important, and lies at the heart of what I think is really significant about Watergate. Yes, it was a clusterfuck that very much reflected the personality of the president and the toxic environment that his administration had become: its paranoia, vengefulness, and sheer nastiness. (Though the ball apparently got rolling mainly thanks to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s meltdown over the Pentagon Papers – the publication of which initially didn’t bother Nixon at all.) But the scandal also highlights the way many such power structures operate. The point is to insulate those at the top with what became known as “plausible deniability.” The sign on Harry Truman’s desk, The Buck Stops Here, was always a joke, as it is in every CEO’s office, and Watergate only drove the point home. The buck is meant to stop long before it gets to the guy at the top. Power is all about being free of responsibility.

There was nothing new in Nixon operating this way. Throughout history the man at the top has enjoyed immunity from blame when things go south. Leading up to the Russian Revolution the masses spared the tsar from most of their anger, feeling that he was just surrounded by evil advisors. A few hundred years earlier Oliver Cromwell had to struggle against similar popular sentiments just before the outbreak of the English Civil War. He had to explicitly reject Parliament’s claim that they weren’t going to war against the king but against his “evil counsellors.” As Christopher Hibbert relates the story in his biography of Charles I, “Cromwell thought this pure casuistry and told his men that if he charged the king he would fire his ‘pistol upon him as at any other private person,’ and that anyone among his recruits who didn’t feel able to do the same could go enlist with someone else.”

One way people in positions of leadership maintain this degree of insulation from the acts of their agents, operatives, and flunkies is by the vagueness of their directions. The clearest historical example of this is presented in Ian Kerhaw’s biography of Adolf Hitler, where he describes the process of what he calls “Working towards the Führer.” What this refers to is the way in which radical actions were often instigated from below, not as the result of express directives, but because they were felt to be in line with Hitler’s broadly defined aims. This was so successful that even today there is no “smoking gun” in the historical record tying Hitler to the ordering of the Final Solution.

All of which brings us back to Watergate and Howard Baker’s famous line about “What did the president know and when did he know it?” We still don’t know. In the final pages of this book Graff presents the points of view of two of the closest of the president’s men:

Haldeman, speaking decades later, said, “No one here today, nor anybody else I can identify, knows who ordered the break-in at the Watergate or why it was ordered.” Ehrlichman, for his part, “The break-in itself made no sense to me; it never has.”

Well, as the saying goes, success has many fathers and failure is an orphan. So it has always been. From the evidence we do have though it seems clear that everyone in the administration was “working towards Nixon”: planning a campaign of dirty tricks that weren’t directed from above but which were in line with the sort of thing Nixon wanted to see happening. And he very well might have got away with it, despite everyone knowing he bore ultimate responsibility, but for the fact that there was a smoking gun in the form of the White House tapes. These nailed him for the cover-up, if not the crime.

To recap: I learned a lot more about Watergate from this book than I thought there was to know, as well as the numerous related side-hustles. I did think there was a bit too much detail in places, the getting lost in the weeds I mentioned above, but even the footnotes (of which there are multitudes) are worth reading. I also really appreciated the way Graff took down pretty much everyone involved, including some names who have previously got off relatively easily. The portraits of Mark Felt (Deep Throat), John Dean, and Al Haig are memorably etched in acid. But to be sure there are still unanswered questions that get to the heart of the affair, which is why Watergate will continue to fascinate generations of historians to come.

Today, we’ll never really know the full truth of Watergate. The remaining mysteries are spread among too many people, many of who are now dead, their secrets buried alongside them. There remain big, unanswered – and perhaps now forever unknowable – questions even about the central Watergate break-in itself: Who ultimately ordered it? What was the actual purpose and target of the burglars? Were its central players, Hunt and McCord, cooperating with the CIA even as they carried out the operation at the DNC’s offices? Were the burglars really after political intelligence or were they hunting for blackmail material?

My own sense is that many of these questions would be unanswerable even if we could still question all the principals under oath. The break-in was just one bad idea among many that some loose cannons were allowed to run with and that nobody in a position of authority pumped the brakes on, perhaps in part because they figured it was the kind of thing Nixon was pushing for, or because they didn’t take any of it seriously. What the burglars were after was dirt in a general sense, or any information of value. I doubt they could have had in mind anything specific. Then, when it all went south, Nixon was very much in charge of the cover-up, which is what deservedly finished him.

Noted in passing:

Among the related mini-scandals Graff chronicles that have slipped into obscurity is the “bizarre episode” of the so-called Canuck letter. I didn’t know about this one either, but it has to do with an anonymous letter sent to a New Hampshire newspaper that accused then Democratic primary candidate Ed Muskie of referring “to French-Canadians with the slur ‘Canucks.’” As it turns out the letter had been the work of Republican dirty tricksters, but Muskie’s campaign swiftly derailed.

What surprised me was that the term Canuck (misspelled as “Cannocks” in the letter) was seen as a slur, or specifically directed at French-Canadians. In the nineteenth century “Johnny Canuck” was a cartoon figure (a lumberjack, not specifically French-Canadian) who was used to personify Canada much as John Bull and Uncle Sam were used as stand-ins for England and the United States. During World War 2 Johnny Canuck became a comic-book action hero, and in the 1970s Captain Canuck was born. The Canucks are also Vancouver’s professional hockey team. But, as Wikipedia explains in their entry on the Canuck letter, “While an affectionate term among Canadians today, ‘Canuck’ is a term often considered derogatory when applied to Americans of French-Canadian ancestry in New England.”

Takeaways:

A successful conspiracy has to be limited in membership and tightly targeted in its aims. Watergate failed, epically, on both counts. There were simply too many people involved, with no one clear on what anyone else was doing, or why. When it started coming undone there was no way to keep containment on the cancer.

True Crime Files

Guilty Admissions: The Bribes, Favors, and Phonies behind the College Cheating Scandal
By Nicole LaPorte

The crime:

Throughout the 2010s a college application counsellor named Rick Singer got some of his wealthiest clients to pay him to arrange their children’s acceptance into prestigious American universities. He did this primarily through two different “side-door” processes: (1) the creation of fake athletic profiles that were sent to coaches who were in on the fix, or (2) having a professional test-taker complete the standardized entrance exams, boosting the applicant’s score into the highest percentiles. The FBI investigation into the conspiracy, codenamed Operation Varsity Blues, resulted in over 50 charges being laid, with the mastermind Singer sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison plus forfeiture of over $10 million.

The book:

This was actually the second major book about the Varsity Blues scandal, the first being Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit and the Making of the College Admissions Scandal by Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz, which Nicole LaPorte cites several times as a source. Both books were “timely” though, being published quickly to take advantage of public interest in the case. As it is, things break off here with the March 12 2019 announcement by the FBI of the results of the investigation and then, in an “Author’s Note,” dashing through some of the highlights from the pleas and sentencings.

When the story first broke I remember being underwhelmed by it. Nothing about it struck me as surprising, or particularly heinous. Just a bunch of very rich people who thought – not unreasonably – that they could buy anything. When I went to university there were various incidents of cheating that I could never get that exercised about. I was there to learn something; what other people were up to, what shortcuts they might have been taking just so they could get their piece of paper, didn’t interest me. It didn’t bother me at all if they weren’t doing the work. If they were there paying tuition then it was all good as far as I was concerned.

The admissions scandal was something a bit different in that less qualified students were getting into elite institutions and in doing so taking spots away from stronger applicants who were playing by the rules. But even so, it’s understood that there’s no level playing field when it comes to going to the top colleges and universities. There are legacy admissions, or the “front-door” expedient of just making a huge donation. There are the “special accommodations” made for testing students with “anxiety,” something which overwhelmingly afflicts the wealthy. And then there is the vast gray area full of ways of playing the system that aren’t illegal or even frowned upon that tilt the odds in your favour. Who can afford independent counselling that can cost tens of thousands of dollars in the first place? And what do such counselors do? I laughed out loud, for example, at this little gem: “Independent counselors don’t write a student’s college essay, but rounds of edits and proofreading are provided, giving the student a distinct edge over those who are left to their own devices.” I’ve worked as an editor and I can assure you that “rounds of edits,” especially on a short piece written by someone who can’t write, amounts to, you know, a total rewrite. And given how much they’re being paid, and what’s at stake (including their own reputations), I’d imagine most of these counselors are doing more than that.

I could only wonder at how obsessed the wealthy families LaPorte describes are with status. Despite the fact that going to a top university isn’t going to affect any of these children’s lives, their parents were “just as desperate about college admissions as families without their wealth and connections.” Why?

Because of their high-profile names and the company they kept – the jobs they held, the philanthropy circles they ran in, the country clubs they were members of – having their child anointed by a top-tier school wasn’t a preferable option; it was considered essential in order to keep the family name intact, and the aura of success and perfection. It was status maintenance of the highest order. In many cases, parents simply felt it was their right, something  they were entitled to, regardless of what means were required to reach that end.

Ah, “entitlement.” Along with its close companion “privilege” it shares a special place in today’s language of opprobrium. But behind all of its perversities and delusions there’s a reality that LaPorte is alert to. That reality is fear.

The anxiety isn’t limited to wealthy parents living in Bel-Air or Beverly Hills. It’s an endemic that’s become a universal among almost all the parents who plan to send their child off to a four-year institution in the hopes of launching them successfully into the world. Indeed, for middle-class families, who don’t have a cushion of wealth and resources to fall back on, one of the most significant rites of passage for an American teen has become fraught with fear. The fear stems from the extreme wealth divide in our country, and the belief that simply getting a college degree – any college degree – no longer implies upward mobility the way it once did. Given the current state of affairs in the United States – the endless headlines about burdensome student debt, the high cost of living, and the growing unemployment rate for college graduates – the desire for an impressive college degree is not just a lofty wish; it’s a do-or-die imperative.

This is fine as far as it goes, but that fear grounded in an awareness of “the current state of affairs in the United States” and its “extreme wealth divide” has a deeper resonance. It’s not just the fear of not getting in or being left behind but also the fear of falling. White people, a former Stanford dean opines, are “terrified, because they’re losing a privilege that they never realized was a privilege” (a pretty good definition of entitlement). And those lucky enough to have found themselves living in Bel-Air and Beverly Hills are only sure of one thing: they never want to lose any part of the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed. To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus . . .

Status maintenance is then a priority for those suffering from status anxiety, and the parents profiled here had the worst possible case of that. After all, by their actions they as much as admit that they don’t believe in the notion of America as a meritocracy. Indeed, they see such notions as being for suckers. How then to stay on top? By rigging the game.

Guilty Admissions is an eye-opening tour of the epicenter of the affluenza pandemic. And it’s an insider’s account too, as LaPorte is resident in the same neighbourhood, with her two kids attending one of the exclusive schools she describes. Being a part of this world, she is able to provide a lot of insight into a world that I didn’t even know existed. Take, for example, the “budding industry of kindergarten-prep tutors and companies,” with one the most popular services offering “one-on-one tutoring, for $350 an hour, to help children master the skills they will need for kindergarten.” This is a thing.

LaPorte has sympathy for the parents (as noted, she is one herself), and her account of the environment of “competitive parenting” that Singer exploited is valuable. But at one point in the story this fellow-feeling does lead to an unintentionally hilarious, and revealing, use of language:

At times, the parents’ spiritual wrestling was painfully palpable, as when Caplan said on a call to Singer. “It’s just, to be honest, I’m not worried about the moral issue here. I’m worried about the, if [his daughter’s] caught doing that, you know, she’s finished.”

Did you get that? The parent isn’t worried about moral issues but only at how his daughter might lose status if she’s caught. This is what counts as “painfully palpable” “spiritual wrestling” in this world!

If status anxiety among the uber-wealthy is one part, the demand part, of the criminal equation, the supply side was provided by Rick Singer. It’s become easy to track everything in the Age of Trump back to the example of the president during the time when Singer’s enterprise was in its fullest swing, but given that the shoe fits so well I have no problem with putting it on again. Singer was an inveterate and indefatigable hustler and con man who took personal-branding and “truthful hyperbole” (Trump’s preferred euphemism for lying) to new levels. And if he was lying all the time then he just assumed that’s what everyone else was doing, or would want to be doing, too. Anything that would help grow not the individual but the brand. “If you’re not cheating, you’re not winning,” was the age’s mantra. And if you weren’t winning you were a loser. The rich would get richer and everyone else would go extinct, which is an observation not limited to individuals. Many colleges and universities would find themselves going under at this time, while the “elite” schools with brand recognition and huge endowments would keep getting richer.

But even the richest most well-endowed universities were grubbing for cash. Like everyone else, they could never get enough. “The culture [at USC] was one of enrichment at all costs, and multiple scandals would come to light down the road as a result.” But wasn’t all the scandal just the price of winning? Everything about the Varsity Blues case comes back to this point: was what Singer was doing really that out of the ordinary? Was it even that bad? The great thing about Guilty Admissions is that it demands we answer these questions for ourselves, forcing us to think hard about how the modern class structure affects all of us today.

Noted in passing:

Those twin demons of entitlement and privilege can reveal themselves in truly shocking ways. All the more shocking for being expressed so matter-of-factly. I already mentioned the demented sense of grievance and of being somehow cheated that pervades all levels of society today, and that the wealthy families who sought to rig the game by Singer’s side-door methods were representative of this. What’s amazing is the way they justified what they were doing by seeing the game as being rigged against them. Why, they were just fighting back against an unjust system! When Singer explained how he proposed to raise the SAT score of one client’s daughter he referred to it as a way to “level the playing field.” Later, that same client would write a letter to the judge sentencing her that she had only wanted to give her daughter “a fair shot.” It tells you something when even the most fortunate among us, and we’re talking about the 0.01% here, feel so hard done by.

Takeaways:

It’s not being cynical to feel that life isn’t fair and that we don’t live in a meritocracy. The game really is rigged. There was a time, however, when the winners weren’t quite so arrogant, deluded, and willfully destructive of the social fabric. That was a long time ago though, and I don’t see how there’s any way we’re getting back to health.

True Crime Files

Love Her to Death
By John Glatt

The crime:

Darren Mack was the wealthy owner of a Reno, Nevada pawn shop who stabbed his second wife, Charla, to death. They had been going through an acrimonious divorce, the terms of which were just being finalized. Angry at the settlement, Mack also shot the judge, Chuck Weller, who had presided over it. Weller was injured but recovered. Mack then fled to Mexico, but soon gave himself up. At trial, after much legal dancing around, he pled guilty and was sentenced to life.

The book:

This is a St. Martin’s Crime title, and I don’t want to knock them because I find them to be in general both highly readable and trustworthy, but they can also be pulpy and scattershot. We could start with the title here, which is just a catchy headline that doesn’t capture anything of the nature of the relationship between Darren and Charla. Darren was a full-blown narcissist who only loved himself, and he killed Charla out of rage at having to pay her a million-dollar divorce settlement. And even cornier is the broken string of pearls on the cover. What does that have to do with anything? Chandra wasn’t wearing pearls when she was killed; it was 9 in the morning and she was dropping her daughter off. And of course there’s a bubble promising “8 pages of chilling photos.” None of the photos are chilling, and they are mostly just tiny screen grabs from television coverage of the trial, poorly reproduced.

There are also quite a few typos, some of which led to real confusion. Like saying “employers” where “employees” is clearly meant, or an incidental victim describing herself as being “in the wrong place at the right time.” I suppose that might have been what she really said, but if so then she was confused.

That said, the writing is lively and the chapters short, which helps when dealing with what was a pretty standard, however tragic, case of domestic violence that only came to national attention because of Mack’s attempt at killing the judge and his subsequent run into Mexico. But it was never much of an “international manhunt,” and the media attention at Mack’s trial (Dateline NBC, 48 Hours, etc.) was wasted on what was an open-and-shut case that ended up with a plea deal. Nevertheless, the trial takes over the latter part of Love Her to Death, filling over 100 pages at the end of a 400-page book. There’s too much detail and quoting of transcripts here, especially with regard to arcane procedural matters that were of no consequence. But this is a trap many true crime authors have trouble avoiding.

A final point I’ll mention, and one that is of more substance, has to do with the difficulty I had in figuring out the actual timeline of the murder, and how it fit with the evidence. Breaking the fatal events down: Mack killed Charla in his garage, then shut the garage door, went into his house, and showered and changed his clothes, as it had been a very bloody business. He also dressed a wound he’d received on his hand. He then went back out and drove Charla’s car into the garage (she’d left it parked on the street in front of the house), while somehow leaving the inside of her car splattered in blood, both Charla’s and his own. Where did this blood come from? Also, there was a man in the house taking care of Mack’s daughter who left in a hurry when he saw Mack first come back inside after he’d killed Charla. But this same man says that when he left the house Charla’s car was already in the garage and the garage door closed. I’m sure somehow this all makes sense but I couldn’t get it straight.

I’ve said this was in many ways an unexceptional crime story but for Mack’s sniping at the judge. But if you wanted to find some deeper meaning in it I’d focus on his adopting the banner of the men’s rights movement. There are some legitimate concerns that this addresses, but Mack made a very poor poster boy for the cause, being the sort of whiny victim that fit into the predominant grievance culture of the time. Just listen to him inveighing against the injustice of the court system on a Web TV show (what we’d call a podcast now) just before killing Charla:

“For me, this is probably what people felt in Nazi Germany, where things started to slide very subtly, and then all of a sudden you find yourself being whisked away to concentration camps. That is the family court system, [and] my experience of it under Judge Weller reminds me much more about what I studied in school about Nazi Germany.”

In the years to come we’d hear a lot more of such nonsense, as every time things didn’t go our way we would blame fascists or Nazis, with every exercise of the rule of law bringing us one step closer to the gulag. The shamelessness of this posturing would be underlined by Mack in the three-hour (!) personal statement he made at his sentencing hearing. “The thing a lot of people don’t recognize,” he would tell the court, is that “I lost a wife too.”

The lack of self-awareness here is next level. His original defence was going to be something along the lines of temporary insanity, which was such a longshot even his attorneys had little confidence in it. The only diagnosis I came away with was that he was a narcissistic sex addict, but that doesn’t let you beat a murder charge. The only thing it leads you to is more of the same sort of behaviour that got Mack into all his troubles in the first place: blaming everyone else for mistakes that he made. We see this thinking everywhere today, and even the legal system can’t always effect a cure.

Noted in passing:

Mack was a narcissist of truly impressive proportions. I mean, he had both a personal assistant and a life coach, though I can’t see where any of them had much to do. He was also an amateur bodybuilder and at one point came in fifth place in a Mr. Reno competition. I wouldn’t have thought this too impressive a finish, but I guess it was Mack’s Mr. Olympia because he celebrated by commissioning “a life-size photo portrait of himself flexing his muscles, which he placed on the wall directly above the urinal of his master bedroom.”

I know what you’re thinking. It’s weird. I mean, a life-size photo? Mack was 5’11”. The photo must have taken up the whole wall. When the police came to search his house they found it notable.

“It was right above his toilet,” Detective Chalmers said, “so literally as he’s peeing in the morning he can look at himself in his Speedos, flexing. That was one of the first indications to me that this person is obviously very egotistical.”

What took me aback almost as much though was that he had a urinal in his master bedroom. I’ve only seen urinals, which are a fixture for standing urination only, in public restrooms. I’ve never seen or heard of one in a private home. But then the detective later calls it a toilet so maybe this was just another case of sloppy editing and Glatt meant to say toilet the first time. The Mr. Reno competition is also later referred to as Mr. Nevada so it’s hard to tell which is right.

In any event, it’s very strange but fits with my own observation that the homes of rich people are almost always decorated in tacky and tasteless ways. And on the subject of the homes of rich people, the McMansion Darren and Charla lived in together was valued at around $1.5 million and had monthly mortgage payments of $8,300! Whew!

Takeaways:

Mack did do some rudimentary planning, even making up a rather damning “to do” list before killing Charla that euphemised her murder as “END PROBLEM.” In a moment of curious detachment he even initialed a change made to the list, as though altering a legal document. He also staked out the judge’s office and pre-selected the best place to set up his sniper station, while buying a plane ticket to Mexico in advance (he’d end up driving) and filling a suitcase with $40,000 in cash to effect his escape.

But after that his planning hit a wall. A pro would have known how to disappear. Mack just ran to one of his favourite swinger resorts and tried to get laid. And how long was that $40,000 going to last anyway? He didn’t even know how to speak Spanish. At least the gormless teens in Let’s Kill Mom tried to escape to Canada.

You often hear it said of such people that they “wanted to get caught.” I don’t think that’s the case. It’s just that not everyone capable of planning a murder can really imagine being a killer, and all the work that it involves.

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